Is the heat in Mexico’s presidential election increasing on Enrique Peña Nieto as candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)? Coming into the final week of the election on July 1, it is suggested that he is a comfortable front runner ahead by 10 points in the opinion polls in relation to his nearest rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). Since 2000, Mexico has been governed by the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). But with the PAN under President Felipe Calderón mired in the “war on drugs” that has cost some 60,000 lives since 2006, the party’s candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota is struggling to define a sense of difference in her campaign. With security such a hot topic in Mexico, one of Peña Nieto’s policy proposals is to create a paramilitary gendarmerie of 40,000 recruited from the army. In that sense it could well be a case of from the frying PAN into the fire of the PRI.

The wealthy classes know only too well how to juggle away revolutions: “Abracadabra!”

Picking up on my series of posts on Victor Serge, my attention now turns to his second novel in the ‘cycle of revolution’, Birth of Our Power, where the narrative moves from a failed uprising in Barcelona to revolutionary victory in Russia. Written in 1931, it should be recalled that Victor Serge was himself a participant-witness to revolutionary action in four countries (France, Spain, Russia and Germany) before settling in his final country in Mexico. The novel covers the revolutionary years of 1917-1919 through the odyssey of the central anonymous character, from the lost revolution in Spain to Red Petrograd. As Richard Greeman brilliantly conveys, as always in his introductory commentaries, the thread of power is weaved in complex counterpoint throughout the novel: in the Barcelona chapters the implicit question is “Can we seize power?”, whereas in the Petrograd scenes towards the end of the book the dominant query is “What will we become when we do take power?”. Greeman has translated and written the introductions for five of Serge’s novels and is secretary of the International Victor Serge Foundation and co-founder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow. But what else does Birth of Our Power reveal about the paradoxes of power and revolution?

As the grandees of the transnational capitalist class of the G20 prepared to meet in the municipality of Los Cabos in the Mexican state of Baja Califonia Sur to discuss global economic crisis, a rather different VIP came to address students, academics, and activists in Mexico. This was the figure of Camila Vallejo, Vice President of the Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile (FECh) and also a member of the youth arm of the Communist Party of Chile, the Juventudes Comunistas de Chile (JJCC). Addressing audiences gathered at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) – Xochimilco and elsewhere in Mexico City, Camila Vallejo has provided a significant moment to reflect further on the struggles led by student movements in Chile, Mexico, and throughout Latin America.